Ma­gento Ecom­merce Vs Prestashop: Which Is Better?

Two of the most pop­u­lar e-com­merce soft­ware pack­ages avail­able are Ma­gento Ecom­merce and Prestashop.

For first time users of e-com­merce soft­ware, there are opin­ions and re­views to wade through that can leave you more con­fused than informed.

The pur­pose of this ar­ti­cle is to make the com­par­isons and the choice clearer with­out get­ting bogged down with a lot of tech­ni­cal terms and detail.

Busi­ness Planning

One of the first con­sid­er­a­tions you will have is to de­ter­mine what size busi­ness you have and how the e-com­merce soft­ware co­or­di­nates with your busi­ness goals. The gen­eral opin­ion about Prestashop is that it is de­signed for small busi­nesses, be­ing par­tic­u­larly easy to set up and use for start-up busi­nesses. On the other hand, Ma­gento is de­signed for small to medium sized busi­nesses, and its ini­tial set up is some­what more complicated.

The ques­tion you have to ask your­self is whether your busi­ness goals are to re­main the same. If you ex­pect to have in­creased sales, in­creased prof­its, a greater in­ven­tory to man­age, and in gen­eral, a larger over­all busi­ness to man­age, then why se­lect a prod­uct that has lim­ited abil­ity to grow with your business?

The an­swer to the is­sue of busi­ness growth is to in­vest in a prod­uct that can grow with your busi­ness with­out hav­ing to pur­chase an­other e-com­merce soft­ware prod­uct in the fu­ture. In com­par­ing Ma­gento and Prestashop, Ma­gento is the choice for fu­ture ori­ented and long-term busi­ness planners.

Search­ing for the Best Product

While it is true every­one will have their own per­sonal pref­er­ence of e-com­merce soft­ware for their busi­ness, it is also true that word-of-mouth ad­ver­tis­ing is, his­tor­i­cally, the best way to get a prod­uct or ser­vice rec­om­mended to po­ten­tial buy­ers. There is a rea­son that some prod­ucts are pre­ferred over oth­ers, and in many in­stances the rea­son is user satisfaction.

In this Age of In­for­ma­tion, Google Search, Google Ad­words and Trends are one of the most used and re­li­able in­di­ca­tors for de­ter­min­ing the in­ter­est in a prod­uct or ser­vice based on their rank­ing sys­tem. Be­tween 2008- when Ma­gento first en­tered the e-com­merce mar­ket (Prestashop de­buted a year ear­lier)- and 2013, the level of in­ter­est in Ma­gento, based on the num­ber of Google search en­tries, was more than dou­ble when com­pared to Prestashop dur­ing the same time period.

When con­sid­er­ing the global growth of In­ter­net busi­nesses dur­ing these years, and the in­creased de­mand for es­tab­lish­ing e-com­merce web sites, the par­al­lel in­ter­est and growth is hard to ignore.

Con­sid­er­ing Spe­cific Features

Prestashop has more than 310 fea­tures in its soft­ware com­pared to a slightly higher 350 in Magento.

In­stal­la­tion and cus­tomiza­tion are two im­por­tant con­sid­er­a­tions dur­ing the pur­chas­ing de­ci­sion, es­pe­cially if the goal is to get the e-com­merce site up and run­ning as quickly as pos­si­ble. These char­ac­ter­is­tics of Prestashop are bet­ter than Ma­gento. While Ma­gento is more cus­tomiz­able, there­fore re­sult­ing in longer set up and in­stal­la­tion times, Prestashop makes a trade-off by hav­ing fewer “out of the box ready” fea­tures available.

Though it is not a ma­jor con­cern for all pur­chasers, it should be noted that Prestashop has spe­cific op­er­at­ing plat­form re­quire­ments that can present a prob­lem for some users. For ex­am­ple, Prestashop has a sys­tem re­quire­ment of Microsoft’s IIS 6 or higher for in­stal­la­tion while Ma­gento does not.

One of the key fea­tures of an e-com­merce soft­ware pack­age is its abil­ity to max­i­mize Search En­gine Op­ti­miza­tion (SEO) ca­pa­bil­i­ties. If your com­pany is go­ing to be rec­og­nized from per­haps mil­lions of com­peti­tors in an in­ter­na­tion­ally com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place, get­ting your com­pany name at the top of the rank­ing list is essential.

Ma­gento has dis­tanced it­self from all of its soft­ware com­peti­tors in con­struct­ing the best SEO fea­tures of any e-com­merce platform.

Sup­port

In the tech­ni­cal sup­port world of the 21^st cen­tury, there are many av­enues by which pur­chasers can re­ceive tech­ni­cal sup­port for their prod­uct. User groups on Face­book and Twit­ter, as well as on the product’s pri­mary web site are used more now than in years past. For Prestashop, it has more Face­book “likes” over Ma­gento by al­most a 5 to 1 mar­gin. Over at Twit­ter, Ma­gento has a 3 to 1 ad­van­tage over Prestashop.

The so­cial me­dia com­par­i­son does not draw a fi­nal con­clu­sion, but Ma­gento wins the tie breaker by hav­ing the best e-com­merce tech­ni­cal sup­port of any soft­ware pack­age on the mar­ket. Users who have any ex­pe­ri­ence with set­ting up fea­ture rich and high per­for­mance soft­ware know that the ini­tial in­stal­la­tion is fraught with prob­lems, ei­ther be­cause of lack of knowl­edge or experience.

Down the road when your cus­tomized e-com­merce site is gen­er­at­ing prof­its and high cus­tomer ex­pec­ta­tions, any prob­lem is per­ceived as a big prob­lem. Un­re­li­able sup­port can lead to lost sales and prof­its, as well as a tar­nished In­ter­net reputation.

Con­clu­sion

In the fi­nal analy­sis, Ma­gento is the pre­ferred choice for small busi­nesses who are seek­ing long-term growth, a pop­u­lar and well-es­­tab­lished e-com­merce soft­ware pack­age, and su­pe­rior cus­tomer sup­port on the In­ter­net or an the tele­phone. Prestashop is com­pa­ra­ble to Ma­gento in many ways, but lim­its it­self, by choice, to meet the needs of its tar­get market.

Each busi­ness owner will make the de­ci­sion based on their needs and vi­sion of the fu­ture of the busi­ness, and both soft­ware pack­ages have fea­tures and ad­van­tages wor­thy of considering.